Image data is an important format of data in a variety of applications. Image data are generally large in size and they are challenging to store, replicate, and back up at a storage system. Particularly, deploying an application-specific compression algorithm in a general-purpose storage system is complicated.
First, there are multiple layers of indirection between the application and the underlying storage system. Maintaining image intelligence, boundaries, and semantics is difficult especially when multiple users are writing image data to the same storage system. Even in a storage system dedicated to image data, there are other system metadata such as directory, file, and object information to be stored. Second, data compression has detrimental impact on system performance. Thus, compression method or system needs to be fast, efficient, and do not require knowledge of the image parameters to be suitable for image data compression for a storage system.